Communication, mmm-mm-mmmm

Back in primary school, we used to have to sing songs in Assembly every morning. Then on Thursday mornings, we'd have "Hymn Practice" instead of Assembly, which in most cases was simply an Assembly by a different name. And then there was the one afternoon a week where the music teacher (who was also my piano teacher at the time) would come into the school and make us sing even more, using material from the BBC's Singing Together radio programme and companion songbooks.

One of the awful songs that has inexplicably stuck in my head ever since those dark, song-filled times ran thus:

Communication, mmm-mm-mmm,
Communication, mmm-mm-mmm,
Way back long ago men sent messages
Beating out rhythms on drums and bones

I remember the rest of the tune, but not the words. It was one of those songs that parents like to describe as "funky" when in fact, due to the fact it's performed by tone-deaf primary school students accompanied by a miserable pianist on an out-of-tune piano, is anything but.

This is a roundabout way of introducing the topic I feel like talking about today which is, oddly enough, communication (mmm-mm-mmm). I apologise, but if you're reading this post, you've probably indulged my flights into the bizarre in the past.

There's been a lot of attention on sites such as Twitter recently, and particularly, it seems, in the last month or so. Ever since Stephen Fry happened to mention it on the Jonathan Ross show here in the UK, people in my group of "real-life" friends have been signing up to it like crazy. This is a big thing, because many Internet "fads" often pass by the UK, the general (i.e. non-geek) population here being afflicted by a sort of general malaise and apathy that causes them to denounce anything where you have to do something that could be remotely considered as "work" (i.e. something where you have to use your brain or, God forbid, write something) to be a Bad Thing.

To give you an idea of how this has gone, let me paint you a little picture. I have been using Twitter for some time now as a means of communicating with my friends in the Squadron of Shame, who are mostly based in the US and Canada. It's been great for that, but it's also been great as a means of "stress relief" – a place to post those thoughts you don't really want to say out loud but you kind of want people to "hear", if you catch my meaning. I often refer to it as a means of externalising your own inner monologue, and for many people it is. Of course, blogs also carry that function for many people, but the immediacy of Twitter, coupled with the fact you are limited in how much you can say, makes it an attractive option for "microblogging", its originally intended purpose.

Now, as I say, I've been using it for some time both as a means of communicating with other people and venting my own frustrations, of which there are many, as you've probably seen. My friends here in the UK often wondered why on earth I was bothering with such a simple website when places like Facebook offered far more in the way of options, applications and other fluff – particularly when Facebook offers its own system for microblogging through its status update system. But the fact is, the simplicity of Twitter is the attractive thing about it. Facebook is full of fluff, and has been growing more fluff as time goes on, as have other sites like it. Now, much more than simply being able to post messages to that hot girl you fancy at college, or trying to avoid exes, Facebook markets itself as a "platform" for the interminable flow of applications that clutter up everyone's profiles and get in the way of the original purpose – communicating.

Twitter does no such thing. Twitter gives you a box to type in what you're doing, and a list of other people's answers to the same query. Nothing more. And as a result, the communication involved is much better. If you want to ask someone something, you ask them. There's no wading through their Tetris high scores, no comparing people and choosing who is "the most punctual" (thanks for voting for me on that one, you obviously don't know me THAT well) and no looking at daily LOLcats. Simple and clear.

There's a time and a place for these different types of communication, of course, but it was just interesting to me that it took a celebrity endorsement for people in this country to pay attention to something as simple as Twitter, while the glitz and flash of Facebook, MySpace and Bebo sweep through the lands like a plague.

With this in mind, over the last few months I've been exploring different alternatives for communicating on the web. With the ubiquity of the Internet these days, you're never very far from some means of talking to another person – be that in real-time via instant messaging services or in a more "when you feel like it" manner via services like Twitter, Facebook and message boards. There's an interesting variety of different approaches.

First, of course, is the humble blog. You're reading this, and presumably you've got this far otherwise you wouldn't know I'd said "presumably you've got this far". Why are you reading this? It could be one of several reasons. It could be because you want to get to know me better, it could be because you're nosey, it could be because you're interested in the things I talk about (though I defy anyone to pin a single "topic" on this blog) or it could simply because you like the way I write. How did you find me? Chances are, in my experience, that you found this place either because I told you, or because you clicked on a link in one of my other friends' sites. How you got here doesn't matter. If you're reading this, you're effectively allowing me to talk at you for several minutes before I pause, look around the room at the people who have been listening intently (and ignoring the people who wandered off to look at porn several paragraphs ago) and invite questions and comments in the… um… comments. Blogs can be good starting points for discussions, but they're inherently one-sided – the blog's writer has most of the power, and commenters have a more "subservient" role, if anything. That's not a bad reflection on any of you thinking about commenting, before you say anything – it's simply the way the medium works.

I find a blog to be a great way of getting complicated thoughts or opinions out of my head in a way I (and hopefully other people) can understand – when expressing myself verbally rather than through text, I often find that social anxiety takes over and I get tongue-tied. Here, though, I can consider what I say before I say it, and then invite questions or opinions after the fact.

Next up, I've been exploring Tumblr. Tumblr is a strange one, somewhere halfway between Twitter and a blog in its execution. Different people use Tumblr for different things. For the self-confessed lazy blogger, it makes a solid, easy-to-use foundation for blogging in the manner I discussed above. For others, such as myself, it becomes a sort of digital scrapbook, a receptacle for all the random noise floating around your head or pictures of cats that you see on the Internet that you don't want to clog up your Twitter stream with constantly.

For others still, it becomes a means of communication, though in a completely different manner to something like Twitter. Tumblr's communication centres around the idea of "reblogging" – taking something that someone else posted, posting it on your own page and adding your own take on it. This is something that tends not to happen with blogs like this one – either because they're too content-rich, too long or simply out of respect for the person who wrote it in the first place. After all, if you want to comment, there's a comments box right at the bottom. Not so on Tumblr, however – because posts tend to be short and snappy – a quote, an excerpt from conversation, a photo – it's easier to reblog them, comment on them and thereby expose them to more and more people. In that sense, Tumblr is very much a viral marketer's dream. Post something cool once and if someone reblogs it, then someone else reblogs it, then someone else… each time it gets more and more views and is accessible to a wider and wider audience.

Take this awesome picture of Darth Vader, originally from the Wired blog, apparently. By the time I came across it, fairly randomly, I might add, it had already been through about ten people. Currently, there are 134 "notes" on the image, which means it's either been tagged as "liked" or "reblogged" by 134 people. Similarly, take the Microsoft Songsmith stuff. There's absolutely no denying that Songsmith is a work of great evil, but I bet you know what I'm talking about without me having to post a link. Viral marketing at work. Sort of.

Then there's more "active" means of communication. I have had a long-time fascination with virtual world Second Life, it still representing a fairly unique branching-off from the typical massively-multiplayer scenario in that there are no goals, no scores, no experience points, no set content – pretty much everything – buildings, objects, scripting that makes objects work, bits of interface, even avatar clothing, hair and body parts – is created by the "players". This is a spectacular achievement, when you think about it, and whatever you may feel about Second Life and the people who enjoy it, there's absolutely no denying that it's an impressive means of communication and expression. It is very much its own world with its own rules and conventions, and it's an interesting place to spend some time, even if you don't plan on staying. Just to confuse matters, I started a Tumblelog about my Second Life experiences here, and microblog about it on yet another site called Plurk, which feeds to a Twitter feed, which… you get the idea.

There are a million and one other sites I could talk about on this note but I feel I have carried on for far too long already. The point of this post is simply to celebrate the possibilities for communication that the Internet offers. It's easy to forget – or at least take for granted – the fact that simply by sitting down in front of our computer, we can easily talk to and interact with people from all over the world. Let's never forget how awesome that is.